Jewish leaders boycott Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Jewish celebration

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a Jewish American Heritage Month reception at Gracie Mansion — which most Jewish leaders boycotted — that he planned to add $26 million in funding to prevent hate crimes to his proposed budget for the 2027 fiscal year.

Few Jewish government officials or nonprofit leaders attended the reception on Monday, which came on the heels of a video that the mayor posted shortly before Shabbat began marking “Nakba” day, which Palestinians say commemorates what they define as the “catastrophe” of the founding of modern Israeli.

The mayor’s office refused to allow JNS, one of two major Jewish news services in the United States, to cover the event in person.

The annual event is usually full of elected and organizational representatives shmoozing and networking. This year, every major Jewish organization in the city, from the Anti-Defamation League to the Jewish Community Relations Council-NY to the UJA-Federation of NY, declined to attend the reception, which doubled as a dairy-filled gathering ahead of Shavuot.

Hate crimes targeting Jews were up 182% in the city in Mamdani’s first month in office. Since then, the New York City Police Department has twice changed the way that it reports hate crimes and has said that such crimes are dropping. The NYPD and the mayor’s office have denied that Mamdani directed the police to change the way it reports such statistics.

Prior to the event, the UJA-Federation of NY said its leaders would not “be attending the Jewish Heritage Month celebration at Gracie Mansion being hosted by a mayor who denies a core pillar of our heritage — the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.”

Among those noshing on blintzes and mini-cheesecakes with the mayor this year were representatives of the anti-Zionist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, as well as the liberal group New York New Jewish Agenda, which says that it supports “a democratic vision of Israel.”

Rabbi Moishe Indig, a leader of the Satmar Chassidic community of Williamsburg and Rabbi David Niederman, president and executive director of the United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg, were also among the 150 attendees.

Satmar is anti-Zionist as a matter of religious principle, it says.

The few Jewish elected officials in attendance were former city comptroller Brad Lander, the virulently anti-Israel candidate for Congress who partnered with Mamdani during the closing weeks of the mayoral election,  and two City Council members: Lincoln Restler, who represents downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights, and Harvey Epstein, who represents Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. 

Irwin Kula, president emeritus of CLAL (the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership), gave the evening’s invocation.

“When the Torah was given at Sinai, the rabbis insist not just the generation of the desert, but every generation across all of time stood at that mountain,” Kula said. “Every age. Every class. Every persuasion. In other words, the tradition insists — even those who would one day deeply disagree with one another, who would one day be almost impossible to reach across the divide to, who would wound each other — all stood together at Sinai.”

“So we are all, even now, standing at Sinai. Together. Receiving the same revelation,” he said at the invocation. “Hearing it differently.”

Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council-NY, which hosts the Israel parade in Manhattan, in which Mamdani, breaking with decades of mayoral tradition, has said he will not march, did not attend the Gracie Mansion reception. He told the New York Post prior to the event that “it’s a really telling and concerning sign of where things stand in New York City right now.”

Kula told JNS after the event that he was cheered by a room filled is “liberal-progressive folks rather than mainstream, legacy institutional leadership.”

He said the absence of legacy leaders “highlights the ongoing collapse of the mainstream, liberal Zionist consensus around which legacy leadership and institutions organized for the past 50 years.”

He closed his invocation with a blessing for the mayor.

“May you be given the continued strength, the emotional depth and the wisdom to hold the complexity of this city, to parse and nuance, with care and precision, the meanings of Zionism, of antisemitism and the inextricable connection of Jewish identity and Palestinian dignity, in ways that open new possibilities of solidarity among all New Yorkers who believe in the infinite value of every human being,” he said.

Reported by JNS